Christmas Books: Celebrities

Mark Sanderson compares the latest seasonal celebrity memoirs

By Mark Sanderson

5:50AM GMT 05 Dec 2010

The Elephant to Hollywood

By Michael Caine

Hodder & Stoughton, £20

A sequel to Mr Caine’s 1992 rickets-to-riches autobiography, What’s It All About?, which proves that at least in some honorary American lives there are second acts. The actor’s career took off spectacularly once again in the late Nineties but this book rehearses his greatest hits – Zulu, Alfie, The Italian Job, Sleuth, Get Carter and Educating Rita – rather than his more recent, and more interesting, work. The anecdotes are top-class and there is plenty of advice for wannabe actors. Never, for example, do full-frontal nudity: 'The minute you are naked you have lost control of what the audience is looking at.’

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The title acknowledges this is the fourth volume devoted to the actress who quivers with intensity even when at her most still. It is a breathless gallop through her career on stage and screen from Tusret in Christopher Fry’s The Firstborn in 1934 to Cranford in 2009 and beyond. However, her favourite play is Rodney Ackland’s Absolute Hell in which she produced the performance of her life at the Royal National Theatre. Adjectival overkill makes this the quintessence of luvviedom.

Confessions of a Conjuror

By Derren Brown

Channel 4, £18.99

A highly unconventional autobiography that paradoxically reveals far more about the subject than traditional life-stories. The illusionist is performing card tricks in a Bristol restaurant before 'a lucky break’ takes him to London and small-screen celebrity. His ricocheting mind – represented by a plethora of footnotes – considers everything from his self-loathing, the joys of ordering on Amazon and the necessity of carpet slippers. While there is a lot of clever talk about magic it is Brown’s take on mundane reality that is most fascinating and – like his performances – ever-so-slightly irritating.

I Must Collect Myself

By Maureen Lipman

Simon & Schuster, £18.99

Always amusing, and warm-hearted rather than waspish, the actress makes a great companion. This collection of newspaper columns, comic monologues and oddball think-pieces reveals that the merry widow has never slept in a tent or scrubbed a floor – lucky her! – but has dined at Buckingham Palace and spent more than 300 evenings with Hugh Jackman: again, lucky her! Like all good reporters she keeps her eyes and ears open wherever she goes. Henceforth it will be impossible to hear the phrase 'figure of speech’ without imagining a 'vigorous peach’.

The Devil Rides Out

By Paul O’Grady

Bantam Press, £20

This follow-up to the million-selling At My Mother’s Knee offers more of the same winning formula: working-class wit, drag queens and all manner of micro-dramas. It’s sharply written, very self-aware and makes you laugh out loud but sadly screeches to a halt in 1980.

What You See Is What You Get By Alan Sugar

Macmillan, £20

The resistible rise of the City’s very own Gruffalo, which sees him morph from a surprisingly handsome young man in Clapton, east London, to an éminence grise in the House of Lords. There’s too much talk about cheap electronics – but then, that is how Suralan made his fortune – but aspiring entrepreneurs will welcome the business advice that is ladled out liberally. The style – if that is not too grand a word – is typically blunt and no one will be left in any doubt about his likes and dislikes. However, the superabundance of detail will have even fans of The Apprentice muttering: 'Reader, you’re tired!’

Can’t Stand Up For Sitting Down

By Jo Brand

Headline, £20

Jo Brand is not kidding when she describes this helter-skelter sequel to her impressive Look Back in Hunger as a 'hotchpotch of musings’. It starts with her squalid experiences as a stand-up comic touring the backwaters of Britain and ends with her brilliant performance in the BBC Four comedy Getting On. Alas, lists of favourite books and films just evoke the sound of a barrel being scraped but Brand is now so famous she was even asked by a doctor for an autograph while she was giving birth.

Life & Laughing

By Michael McIntyre

Michael Joseph, £20

Anyone wanting to know why this stand-up comedian’s first DVD (which, not coincidentally, shares its title with these memoirs) was the fastest-selling disc of all time will not find the answer here. Fans of his shows will recognise much of the material. McIntyre specialises in the absurdities of life and the experiences that we all undergo: school, adolescence and falling in love. Half-Canadian and half-Hungarian, he calls himself a Canary and twitters like one too. Self-deprecating to a fault, the result is vaguely amusing but disappointingly decaffeinated.

It All Counts

By Carol Vorderman

Headline, £20

A third-class degree in civil engineering from Cambridge has not stopped Ms Vorderman building a very successful career in television. Her mother forged her application to be on Countdown which landed her a job doing sums for £30 an edition (she is curiously reticent about how her earnings soon skyrocketed). The daytime game show eclipses everything else in this amateurishly written book – childhood, marriage, motherhood. In other words, it’s autobiography by numbers.

Through Thick and Thin

By Gok Wan

Ebury, £18.99

The son of parents who ran a Chinese restaurant, the future host of How to Look Good Naked weighed 21 stone as a teenager so he knows all about the hard work involved in makeovers. In addition he had to deal with bullying, anorexia and coming out but, having made riches from rags, it all ends happily. However, it’s a relief to find, having laid bare his soul, there are no nude photographs.